I've decided to get a proper domain for my WoW Gem Finder application that was on a subdomain (wowgems.jponrails.com). The new domain is www.wowgemfinder.com.
This should be an interesting experiment and will yield an answer to the eternal question: what is the effect of moving a site to a new domain on the site's PageRank.
I expect my PageRank to be disrupted, but eventually, in 3 months or so, I expect it to be better, since the new domain name is more SEO-friendly than the old one.
I took care of all the necessary things, including:
Redirecting (301) incoming requests to the new domain using mod_rewrite;
Changing references to the old domain within the site (I had a few absolute links, notably for the widget and the add-a-link text);
Updating Wiki entries on a few websites that point to my application;
Sending out a few emails to my most important incoming link sources;
Letting Google (and MSN, and Yahoo!) know that the new domain exists.
Now, all I have to do is sit back and see what will happen to my PageRank. Hopefully, the transition won't be too brutal. I'll keep you posted!
It didn't take much time to implement, a few hours, most of the time spent fiddling with the layout to make it nice.
I initially made that site when I played World of Warcraft (I've quit since) but I still maintain it because it's quite popular with the community and it still gets a couple of thousand visits every day.
So I just Googled myself to make sure that I'm still the top result. Of course I am, I take great pride in dislodging the other Jean-Pierre Martineaus out there.
However, I found this, which is the second result when I google my name, and is written by another Jean-Pierre Martineau.
So? Well, let's say you're applying for a job or a bidding for a contract. Chances are the potential employer will look you up and find results which have nothing to do with you. This could be damaging. The example I provided is such a case: it's a question posted on a message board. No biggie. But what if that question directly contradicts what you claim you are.
The question is one that a computer sciences student would ask, not one that an experienced C/C++/Objective-C programmer would. There lies the problem. According to my resumé, I have substantial experience in C/C++ and know Objective-C pretty well. If someone is running a background check on me reads that post could easily be put off and assume that I am exaggerating my skill level.
Like every other information found on the Internet, one must be careful with background checks. Not everything is you read is true.
And for the record, I do own the Design Patterns book. It's at an arms reach on my bookshelf and It's one of my favorite books, having read it (non sequentially) many times.
P.S.: Just to make sure I don't bump up that forum posting I added rel="nofollow" to the above link!
P.P.S. I just realized that I posted this in english. My bad. This article was originally posted on my french blog.
There's a nice article about Radialpoint (formerly Zero-Knowledge Systems) in l'Actualité.
It talks about the dramatic turnaround that the company made since 2001. It went from a 3M$/month burnrate to 20M$ profits last year.
Ok, I don't usually talk about this sort of stuff on my blog, but this time, I'm making an exception because I used to work there. In fact, I was a part of that turnaround. I worked on many of the key projects that saved that company from burning down to hell, while the dot-com bubble pop was putting just about every company in our situation out of business.
I implemented the first version of the Anti-Virus, was part of the team that designed the "Service Model" that allows the product's white-label branding. After that, I switched from Windows/C++ to the back-end team where I wrote the code that allowed us to tap into the third party's resellers billing systems, and designed and coded the application which manages all the software updates (anti-virus signature files amongst many things, etc.)
That was me. I was one person amongst perhaps 45 at the darkest hour (down from 225!). Everybody was doing the best they could to keep the ship afloat. I can't say that individually, we believed we'd succeed. In fact, most of the technical people didn't think we could pull this off, but as a team, we believed that we had a shot at it. A slim, unrealistic, fueled by despair shot at success. Success, at that time was defined as "getting our paycheck and coming to work to unlocked doors". So we kept on going along with what management said, how unrealistic improbable it may have sounded been at the time (and it was!). (Has any of you been through the 3-month release-cycle mode for 2 years?)
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I learned a couple of thing at Zero-Knowledge. First off, when you think you've reached the bottom, you can still go further down. Way down. But I also learned that when shit goes to hell, if you stick around for the ride, you can achieve great things. Bailing out was the easy thing to do - many people did, but today, as I look back to those days where we struggled to keep the company alive, I realize that we pulled off nothing short of a corporate Apollo 13, and I'll always be proud to have been a part of that.
I set out to write a small application last week. After 6 days worth of free time, I give you Xornot's Gem Finder. It's a small Ruby on Rails application that allows you to find World of Warcraft gems.
I wrote this small application because no-one else did and I wanted to use it. Also, because I wanted to prove that simple, straightforward projects that can be done in a matter of days, can be very useful in the real world.
And useful it is, if I look at my log, which is continuously serving request every few seconds, a mere 6 hours after I made the URL public.
Anyways, used the acts_as_taggable plugin to index the information. If were to do it again, I'd modify the plugin to actually generate the tags automatically from the object data. Since I was already feeding the database when I thought that up, I decided to put that idea on ice and perhaps recycle it in another project. Nevertheless, the dataset is now complete and I have a laboratory to play around with tags. At the present moment, I don't do anything [out of the ordinary] with them, but I will try different things in the weeks to come.
I'll post the appliction's access statistics as soon as I gather enough. I think this will be surprising.
Update 2007-03-07 17:11
After six and a half days online, the site has had 2964 unique visitors and 3629 visits (1.22 visits per visitor). 16568 pages were served, an average of 4.56 per visit. These stats exclude non-visible spider traffic. Not too shabby!
